


the last princess of alderaan

by songstress



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Adoption, Canon - Movie, F/M, Family, Post-Traumatic Stress, Recovery, healing process
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 09:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6561274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songstress/pseuds/songstress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia always considers herself a citizen of the galaxy. She never knows how Alderaanian she is, until Alderaan is gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the last princess of alderaan

Leia grows up a princess, her mother a queen. She is the golden child; she has her father’s laugh and her mother’s biting wit, her father’s impatience and her mother’s refusal to brook fools. She cannot stand still – she cannot sit still – she wants to learn everything there is to know. They whisper on Alderaan that the Princess will rule the galaxy one day; she is a whirling ball of energy, intense and vibrant, and to see her is to love her.

She is always bound for the Senate. It feels right to her, in ways she cannot explain, that go beyond the fact that it is her father’s profession. At first she thinks she will have a long wait before her father is willing to retire; but when she turns seventeen, her parents call her into her mother’s study.

“You’re trying to bring down the Empire,” she says, slowly, when they have finished. 

Her father is an excellent Senator, but at home he has been warm and a bit silly; when she was a girl, he used to tickle her and swing her up into the air, and when she grew too old for that, he started to tell puns that make her groan, and muddle the punchlines of jokes. He sings funny little songs while he gardens, and creates extravagantly offensive profanities as a hobby.

Now he is sitting absolutely still, his face a mask that Leia has never seen before. Or was the past a mask, and this reality? She cannot see her laughing father as a rebel, risking not only his life but his entire family’s – but she would believe this man could.

“Yes,” he says.

She turns to her mother, head of the family. She knows from her father’s face that this is no joke but deadly reality; yet still she looks to her mother for final confirmation. From the time she could toddle – which she did quite early, and was lucky not to tumble down any staircases in her reckless explorations – she has followed in her mother’s footsteps. They have sometimes fought (for she has inherited the Organa temper), and she has always been wilder than her mother, happy to scuffle and climb trees and skin her elbows, but Leia is the woman she is because of her mother’s guidance. Wit and ferocity, strength and tenacity, charm and diplomacy, and a certain bloody stubbornness – all come naturally to Leia, but it is her mother who has helped her sharpen them into weapons.

Now, looking at her mother’s serene face, Leia realizes that those weapons were made for war.

Her mother meets her eyes – calmly, steadily. “You were a child,” she says, answering Leia’s unspoken question. “We wanted to protect you for as long as we could.” She spreads her fingers in a graceful gesture, the image of a monarch not a revolutionary. Masks upon masks. “Now you are an adult. It’s time for you to know.”

“You don’t have to join us,” her father says, as if that has ever been a question, as if Leia could ever have chosen any other path, when the two people she loves so fiercely have apparently been putting themselves into danger for her entire life. 

Leia snorts, and uses one of her father’s favorite extravagant profanities. 

And just like that, she becomes a rebel.

-&-

Leia always considers herself a citizen of the galaxy. She never knows how Alderaanian she is, until Alderaan is gone.

She meets the Emperor long before an unknown farmboy from a forgotten planet. When she is presented to him, she is the youngest Senator ever to take up her office, eighteen and unafraid; by the time she leaves his presence, she is still eighteen, but no longer unafraid. 

Now she is in the clutches of Vader and Tarkin, and the fear is in her blood, her lungs, her racing heart. She was prepared to be tortured. She was prepared to be strong. She was prepared to die. Though she had tried not to think of it too much, she was prepared to lose her family, particularly her father; to be rebels against the Empire is to be always in danger. 

She was not prepared for this. A few of the people she loves might be offplanet, but she knows her parents are not. Her mother is hosting a state dinner this week, and her father has gone to ground in the secret Rebellion installation under the wine cellar, as the great and glorious tread majestically through the palace halls above his head.

Tarkin looms over her, pushing her back into Vader’s unyielding chestplate. She is caught between her executioner and her torturer, trapped and alone. “I grow tired of asking this, so it will be the last time. Where is the rebel base?”

She looks over his shoulder for a long second, memorizing the familiar sight of her beautiful planet. She knows it will be the last time, even as she plays her last desperate card, giving him an incorrect answer, hoping he will somehow decide to give Alderaan a reprieve. It would only be temporary; she knows Tarkin, and she knows his spite would bring him back to punish her lie, even if she had already been executed. 

But she thinks she can die more peacefully if she buys the planet she loves one more day; and surely the looming battle station cannot have gone unnoticed. Every hour she can delay the destruction would buy the lives of thousands, as every starship on Alderaan took to the skies.

“Dantooine,” she says. “They’re on Dantooine.”

“There, you see, Lord Vader,” Tarkin says, pleased. There is a power struggle there, and some part of her files the knowledge away, even though she knows it is unlikely that she will live to use it. “She can be reasonable.”

Vader’s harsh breathing surrounds her, and she will forever hear it as the unforgiving background to Tarkin’s next words, burned on her memory like a brand – “Continue with the operation. You may fire when ready.”

She starts forward, no plan, no weapons, but she must do _something_ ; Vader reaches out and pulls her back against him, inflexible, unmoving, powerful. Restrained, she can only watch as Alderaan ceases to exist.

She can hear nothing except the screaming inside. 

When the shock wears off, Leia finds herself back in her cell. She rests; but if her captors think she has succumbed to despair and will go quietly to her fate, they are incorrect. Perhaps it will give them satisfaction to see her struggle, like a hunter enjoying the death-throes of its prey – perhaps a better death would be regal and calm, giving them no joy of it. But it is not in Leia to go quietly, even if Tarkin will smile, even if Vader will feed his dark power on her agony. She will fight to her last breath. 

(Thinking about fighting is easier than thinking about her mother’s face, her father’s smile.)

The door opens. She readies herself for battle, the last Senator and Princess of Alderaan.

But it is a farmboy dressed as a Stormtrooper. It is almost with relief that Leia leaps at the chance to push her agony away, layer it over with urgency and attitude and bared-teeth recklessness; blaster in hand, she assumes command of the inept rescue and fights her way out, aggressive trash compactors and derelict smuggler ships notwithstanding. 

When she rejoins the Rebellion, she finds that they see her as the natural successor to her father. There is no time to grieve her parents; there is an Empire to fight, and Leia will not disappoint their memory. White-faced and dry-eyed, she soldiers on.

Her story begins again.

-&-

Three years later, when the farmboy (turned best friend) tells her that she is his sister, and by extension the biological daughter of Darth Vader, Leia cries in Han’s arms for a few minutes, and then goes into the forest and throws up everything in her stomach.

“You all right in there, princess?” Han calls through the trees, awkwardly kind.

She wipes her mouth, squatting on her heels. 

When she was six years old, she was in a fight with a bigger girl, the daughter of one of her mother’s handmaidens. The girl had some hand-to-hand training (though not with any of the handmaidens’ edged weapons), and Leia had only her own tenacity. She came into her mother’s study afterwards, head held high, with her nose dripping blood, a scraped cheek, two broken nails, and a burning desire to learn to box.

Her mother set down her paperwork and raised an eyebrow. 

Leia jutted her chin up. “She said I wasn’t a proper princess.”

(She had never felt more like a princess, defending her reputation and her honor on the field of battle. Later, when she commanded armies, she would regret the limited scope it gave for individual action; it was called recklessness when generals hazarded themselves, but part of her longed for a blaster and an enemy, and the rush of battle.)

“Why would she say that?” her mother asked, steepling her fingers against her lips. It was a pose that Leia was well acquainted with.

This time, however, she knew herself in the right, and crossed her arms in indignation. “She said you weren’t my real mother, and papa wasn’t my real father. She said I wasn’t a proper princess at all.”

She had always been aware that she was adopted. Her parents had never hidden it from her – why would they? Her first mother had been a family friend, who had died when Leia was very small; her picture had stood on Leia’s dresser all her life. 

Her mother pulled her handkerchief out and beckoned Leia over. “So you thought you could change her mind by fighting her?”

Leia considered the matter while her mother stanched her bleeding nose. “No,” she admitted, somewhat muffled. “I was angry.”

“I can imagine,” her mother agreed. “You are my daughter, which means you’re a princess. She was wrong.”

Leia nodded firmly, vindicated, which then meant the stanching had to recommence.

“But,” her mother said, drawing her up on her lap, “being a princess means you have to be careful about fighting.”

“She didn’t hurt me,” Leia said, loftily, because it didn’t count as being hurt if you refused to acknowledge that you were hurt.

“What if she had?” her mother asked. “What if she had hurt the princess? How would she feel? If you broke your leg, and the holonews had pictures of you, and they reported that a handmaiden’s daughter had hurt you?”

Leia frowned. “They should mind their own business.”

Laughing, her mother pressed a kiss to the top of her hair. “Yes. But they don’t. You’re a princess, Leia – the only one Alderaan has. You’re loved, not only by me and your papa, but by the whole world.” She hugged Leia close. “That means you have to be careful when you’re angry. I won’t tell you not to be angry, because anger is important sometimes. But you have to _think_ when you’re angry.”

“You’re never angry,” Leia said, judgmentally, twisting to look up into her mother’s lovely face.

Her mother smiled at her, eyes bright. “Everyone gets angry, sweetheart.”

As she grew, Leia never managed to learn to control her anger as well as her mother did. It bubbled within her, underneath her skin, and was quick to surface. But she tried, because she was a princess, and because it made her mother happy. She learned to think first (some of the time), and how to calm herself in order to judge whether anger was a useful response in a given situation. The lessons didn’t always stick, but she did try.

Now she thinks back to that afternoon, to the safety and security of her mother’s arms, to the blood spatter on her mother’s gown. It was the only time she fought over her adoption; to most Alderaanians, she was simply their princess, the daughter of their beloved queen, and if she had been born the daughter of someone else, that mattered not at all.

But now it matters. Now she is the daughter of Vader, and Leia doesn’t know how to handle that. The anger that has fizzed under her skin all her life – is that his anger, handed down? The times she has punched her training dummy as hard as she can, taking out her anger and frustrations, does she reflect his killing rage? Luke says she has the Force, like him, like Vader. What terrors might she inflict?

She wonders if her mother knew, that sunny afternoon – knew that the child she held so close had the capacity within her to terrorize a galaxy, knew that the child’s first father was a monster. She wonders if her mother was afraid, even for a moment, when her daughter was so angry; she wonders if her mother was angry on her behalf, that her little daughter had such an unknowing heritage.

She imagines her mother looking down at Vader’s child, and choosing to love her.

She finds that she is crying.

Han calls out to her again. “Leia?”

She raises her head. “I’m fine,” she says, though she is not.

After they have won, and the second Death Star is gone, and Vader is dead and burned, she goes to the medicos before she sleeps with Han. There will be no more Organas with the Skywalker curse. She will not give her anger to another generation; she will not risk another Vader.

-&-

When Han stiffens next to her, his body going rigid as a board, she wakes instantly.

“Shhh,” she says, slipping to the floor, pulling the sheets with her, kneeling up and taking his hand. It is one practiced movement now, after so many nights curled up next to him. “You’re safe. I’m here.”

The carbonite nightmares make his heart race dangerously, and he cannot handle any restrictions, whether that be sheets tangling his legs or a warm lover’s arm weighing him down. She holds his hand, keeps her voice calm, tells him he is safe, tells him he can move. 

At last she hears his breathing even out again, and his death-grip on her hand slackens. “Sorry,” he says, his voice a rasp in the darkness. 

“Never be sorry,” she says, rising off stiff knees and curling up next to him, sheltered in the lee of his strong side. He pets her hair and the curve of her neck, and she relaxes, her own nerves subsiding.

She can’t remember the last time they slept through the night. If Han doesn’t dream, she does. Alderaan has exploded a thousand times for her; Vader and Tarkin stalk through her mind, torturing and taunting; she watches Han descend into the carbonite, a living death; her parents disintegrate into dust before her eyes. When it is her that wakes, gasping, sometimes screaming, Han knows to hold her close, tell that her that she is safe, that he is alive, that Vader is dead. Occasionally she hits him, still half-asleep, convinced that he is Tarkin or Vader, but he never draws back, only keeps talking, his familiar voice reminding her brain that it is over.

Not that it is truly over. Vader and the Emperor may be dead, but the remnants of the Empire must still be destroyed, piece by piece. Two years after Endor, she is as busy now as she has ever been; busier, for her nights are no longer peaceful solitude, but disturbed by the welcome presence of Han and the unwelcome presence of their pasts.

“I’ve been thinking,” Han says, his voice a rumble next to her ear.

He is warm, and she is safe. Leia smiles, and knows he will feel it against his chest. “Surely not.”

“Ass,” he says, without heat, his hand still stroking her hair. “Luke’s leaving next week to go find Force kids.”

Leia’s relationship with the Force is still uneasy. After Endor, Luke had assumed he would immediately begin to train her, so that they could start a new Jedi Order together. He had been hurt when she declined, but she simply couldn’t join him. She does not trust herself, with Vader’s blood in her veins, with the memories of his atrocities playing on loop behind her eyelids every night. Let others take up the calling. There were always many Jedi, in the old days – the Emperor systemically eliminated or kidnapped Force sensitives throughout his rule, but surely the galaxy will be beginning to fill up with Force-sensitive children again. Luke can build a new Order out of them; unscarred, full of promise, full of hope.

“Yes,” she says. “Do you want to go with him?” He gets wanderlust if he’s tethered too long, and she doesn’t try to keep him planetside when he wants to roam. She’s in love with a rogue; to tame and domesticate him would be cruel. 

He rolls to face her, and she can see the outlines of his features in the moonlight from their tiny window. “No,” he says. “But I was thinking…”

When he stalls, she heroically ignores the urge to tease him again, and leans up to kiss him instead. “What were you thinking?” 

“He might be gone a long time,” he says. “Probably will be. He gets distracted.”

“Is there a reason we’re talking about my brother instead of having sex?” she asks, because she has a little problem with patience, and he is very warm, and very close.

Han blinks, then laughs. “I just thought, we should get married before he goes so he can be there.”

They’ve talked about marriage before. It isn’t Leia’s biggest priority; she doesn’t need to say the words to know she loves Han, and that he loves her. Alderaan was never a puritanical culture – there are few of those left in the galaxy – and she cares about realities, not formalities. 

Still, there is something attractive about throwing a party to celebrate their relationship. There have been many marriages since Endor; Luke says earnestly that it’s life-affirming, along with the ridiculously large baby boom. Leia has drunk to the happiness of many friends, and stood godmother to many infants, including (in her opinion) far too many little namesakes. 

“All right,” she says, easy, and kisses him again. “Now can we have sex?”

They keep the wedding small. Leia wears her mother’s necklace and focuses on Han’s bashfully radiant face, not on all the absent dead. 

She’s not sure what her parents would have thought of Han. She thinks they would have liked the way he makes her smile, soft and full; their prickly banter would have made her mother laugh. When they dance at the party (to which the entire base shows up, uninvited), she imagines dancing with her father, and has to lean her head against Han’s shoulder as she fights back tears. 

“Say the word, and we’ll make a break for it,” Han says. “I can have the _Falcon_ ready before you change out of that dress.”

Leia lifts her face and smiles at him, a little watery. “I was just wishing my parents could have known you.”

Han’s eyebrows shoot up. “They’d probably have run me out of town. Their little girl and a notorious smuggler?”

“You’re _my_ smuggler,” she says, and rests her hand against his cheek. “They would have loved you.”

-&-

They have been married a year when Luke returns.

Leia is reading an intelligence report when she feels his ship touch down. She knew he was coming hours ago, when he asked for clearance to land, but there’s intellectual knowing, and then there’s his familiar feel in the Force. Although she’s still not comfortable with her Force abilities, she can’t turn this one off, or refuse to train it; Luke is simply a warm presence in her mind, comforting and close.

“You work too much,” he says, when he looms in her doorway twenty minutes later. 

He must have come straight from the hangar; he looks tired. “So do you,” she says, tucking a curl behind her ear. She tries to keep Alderaanian hairstyles, in a wordless homage to her dead world, even if no one recognizes them; Han, however, has a detrimental effect on her hair’s tidiness, however sturdy the coiffure.

Luke laughs. “Guess we’re a matched pair.”

Leia slides her work away and gets up to hug him. She wishes sometimes that they had grown up together; she would have loved a brother as a child, although she suspects that she would have dominated their relationship. Luke was an earnest farmboy when she first met him, and only gained his mature confidence after his training. She can easily imagine the sort of scrapes she might have got him into – but it would have been nice to have had a comrade in arms, in mischief and in consequences. 

“How did it go?” she asks, as they head out in search of Han. “Did you find anyone to train?”

He nods. “The old Jedi Order only took young children, but that won’t work now. I don’t think separating them from their families was a good idea, and anyway there aren’t enough yet. But I have nine recruits – five adults and four children with their families.”

Leia is already mentally sorting through living quarters. They aren’t overcrowded, but family living space is at a premium presently, with the ongoing baby boom since Endor. She’s about to ask how large the four families are, but Luke isn’t finished. “Oh, and one more.”

“One more?” she asks, taking his arm to steer him around a gaggle of starstruck mech techs. She’s not sure about Jedi policy on romantic relationships – weren’t they all celibate monk types back in the Republic? – but about half the base appears to be in love with Luke at any given time. It’s the Jedi pheromones, she thinks, and just because Luke says those are Not A Thing, she doesn’t have to believe him.

Luke is hesitating, which isn’t a good sign with him. She pulls him into a janitor’s closet, wary of being followed by the fanclub. “Out with it.”

He grins. “You’re bossy today.”

“I’m not bossy, I’m in command,” Leia says, refusing to be sidetracked. “There’s a difference. Spill.”

He sits on an upturned mop pail, somehow managing to look graceful. Damn Jedi skills. “I found one Force sensitive on an Imperial base. It was their policy to take any Force sensitives in the area and send them to Coruscant to be examined by the Emperor. Some he killed, some he used.”

Leia remembers the sheer evil that had sat around the man like a cloud, and suppresses a shiver. She must have been perceiving him through the Force; she wonders now why he didn’t seize her immediately, if he was so eager to capture all Force sensitives. Perhaps he saw her as a curiosity, found it amusing to have a Force-sensitive Senator; perhaps he planned to seize her at his leisure, whenever it pleased him – but perhaps it was her status that made her a less appealing target. Not an impossible one, but one to be planned more carefully.

She is in awe of the bravery and desperation of her parents, to hide her in plain sight. Protecting one of the galaxy’s two bright hopes, Vader’s own child, and they did not conceal her away, as Kenobi had Luke. They placed her in full view, the beloved princess of Alderaan. She grew up hounded by holoreporters, her birthday parties covered in the press, her every exploit commented on. And with the lack of privacy she was made as safe as possible; glitzy and overexposed, no threat at all.

“Were they tortured?” she asks, abruptly, because if they were, she needs to mobilize a medical team. She knows the scars that Imperial torture leaves; the physical marks are the easiest and quickest to heal.

Luke looks startled, and then reaches out an involuntary hand. But she was not asking for pity; she keeps her head held high, and he drops his hand again. “No. They took him because they hadn’t received other orders, but they didn’t know where to send him. So when I came along, he was in limbo, bored but in no immediate danger.”

Leia will talk to him anyway. Even if he wasn’t physically tortured, simply being in the hands of the Imperials for any length of time is torture enough. They were extremely skilled at psychological warfare; at the very least she can help him deal with the dreams.

“The thing is,” Luke says – and whatever’s making him uncomfortable, this is it – “he’s just a kid.”

“You said you had four children and their families,” Leia says, not seeing the issue.

Luke shifts his weight on the mop pail. “Yes. But the youngest is eight, and she has three overprotective parents to look after her. This one…” He sighs, scrubbing at his face. “They killed his family, Leia. When they took him. His family fought for him, and the Imperials killed them.”

Leia concentrates on breathing for a few moments, fighting back the white-hot rage that tries to surge within her. It shouldn’t have been surprising. She has seen Imperial violence on countless occasions; one family is simply a drop in the bucket.

“He’s all alone,” Luke says, “and he’s only three years old, and he’s lost and afraid. I had to take him – there wasn’t anywhere for him to go – but I don’t know how to reach him. I’ve tried to … but he doesn’t trust me, and I don’t blame him…”

“Where is he?” Leia asks, cutting him off. 

“With the others,” Luke says, “in the hangar,” but Leia is already out the door.

She sees him immediately when she reaches the hangar. Luke’s motley crew of Force-sensitives looks like any other lot of refugees; there have always been many who flee to the Rebellion, although their numbers have begun to slow lately, as more of the galaxy settles into a mostly-peace. She smiles at a preteen girl, who stares at her, mouth agape. The Alderaan papers must have made it out to her homeworld, or perhaps she saw some of the propaganda the Rebellion has been putting out lately; there’s a particularly embarrassing one of Leia and Han posed together in all their medals like a holoromance.

Beyond the families, however, there’s a familiar shape, bent over a small child. She heads straight for him. “How is he, Chewie?” she asks, already squatting down so that she isn't a scary adult looming over the child, but another small person on his level.

“Scared,” Chewie says, as the child raises his head and Leia sees that Chewie is right.

He is scared; he is frightened of the lights and the people, of the loud happy families and the enormous strange Wookiee; he is afraid that any moment he will be yanked away and put back in the tiny little place where he was kept, alone and unloved; he is screaming inside, still seeing his mother killed in front of him; and he is angry, angry, angry at the Stormtroopers, angry at the happy families, angry at Luke, angry at the universe, with a white-hot rage that is shocking in one so small, bubbling out of him and hurled out into the air.

She understands why Luke is worried.

Luke comes up behind her, and she asks, keeping her voice calm, like she would in front of a skittish animal, “What is his name?”

“I don’t know,” Luke says, and she can hear the exhaustion in his voice. “The records didn’t say. I don’t suppose his family had a chance to tell them, or maybe the Imperials didn’t care. I’ve been calling him Ben.”

Leia’s calves are beginning to ache. Carefully, she settles onto the ground. “I need everyone to go away,” she says. “Luke, take them to the quartermaster’s and get them settled.”

It’s a curt dismissal, but Luke knows her well enough that he won’t be offended. He gathers his people and ushers them away, helped by Chewie. Leia stays.

She sits on the ground in the hangar for three hours, hands turned palm-up to show that she is safe, not a threat, not a danger. The boy looks at her out of the corners of his eyes, every so often, and she projects calm, safety, warmth. She hasn’t been trained in the Force, she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing, if it’s working at all – but she has been through his agony herself, and she has slept with two people’s nightmares. If anyone is qualified to try, it is her.

In the third hour, quite suddenly, the boy asks, “Where's mama?”

Leia knows he saw what happened to his mother. No child should have to see that. “Your mama isn’t here,” she says, gently, thankful that he speaks Basic.

There are tears in his eyes when he looks up at her. “She got hurt,” he says. “They hurt her.”

Leia feels the tears start in her own eyes – for the boy; for his mother, who died protecting him; for the nineteen-year-old child watching her parents and her entire world destroyed. “You’re safe now. I won’t let them hurt you. I promise.”

“Promise?” he says, unexpectedly fierce.

She nods, holding his gaze as solemnly as if she was making an adult vow. “I promise.”

He comes into her arms like a wounded bird, small and light. 

-&-

At seventeen, Leia Organa became a rebel. At eighteen, she became a Senator; at nineteen, she lost her family and her homeworld; at twenty, she led a galactic rebellion; at twenty-two, she gained a brother; at twenty-four, she married the man she loved.

As Vader’s daughter, she was firmly resolved never to pass on his legacy. Luke could preach forgiveness all he wanted, and perhaps it worked for him. Perhaps he saw the better man Vader had once been, the momentary redemption when Vader sacrificed his own broken body to save his son. Leia could not. She saw only torture and death, the pain of innocents, her own screams. He had not sacrificed himself to save _her_.

Motherhood was not a challenge she intended to face; she would be a general, a leader, a friend, a sister, a wife, but never someone’s mother. There was enough to do in the galaxy without taking on that role, and more than enough godchildren to satisfy any maternal instincts. Little Poe, Shara’s boy, was already learning how to fly; and then there were all the little Leias.

But now it all changes. 

Leia is twenty-five the year Ben comes into her life, a whirlwind of anger, pain, and need. Before he came, she was so afraid of giving birth to Vader’s heir; now all she knows is that Ben needs her, and she cannot send him away.

Han is with her all the way. She has never asked him about his past, and she never will; but he looks at the little anguished body in her arms, and she knows he would fight to the death to protect him.

It will be a long road. There are three of them who wake with nightmares now. 

But a month after Ben’s arrival, he is best friends with Artoo and chatters with him for hours. He has a safe place in the closet for him to retreat to when he gets overwhelmed, and a fleet of psychologists who are sadly all too familiar with post-traumatic care. He has favorite toys, and favorite foods, and favorite music. He does not yet go outside, or into any open spaces; but he will snuggle into Leia’s arms and listen to bedtime stories, and Leia tells him of a planet called Alderaan, and the way the wind sung in the trees.

(She thinks of her parents a lot these days.)

On the first Death Star, Leia lost her family in a single searing instant. She will bear the shrapnel of that loss for the rest of her life; not a day goes by that she doesn’t feel the ache of their absence. But she is strong. She is an Organa, the heir to generations of fighters, and she builds again. 

Her new family is full of love, but complex and knobbly, crotchety and difficult. A fussy droid, an impertinent droid, a temperamental Wookiee, a dubiously-reformed smuggler, and three conflicted, often tormented Force-sensitives – it would be enough to drive anyone a bit dizzy. And some days Leia does feel overwhelmed, as she tries to helm a military force and a family at the same time. 

For the first time since Alderaan died, however, she thinks she is beginning to heal.

-&-


End file.
